Nothing Is What It Seems
by KSherwood
Summary: A disgruntled college student accidentally wishes herself into the Labyrinth, without having read the book!  Rated T for caution.
1. I Wish

Nothing Is What It Seems

I picked up Banned Book Number 3: a novel-length fairy tale called _Labyrinth _and scanned it. Why did people ban books? A poem about breaking dishes "encourages children to commit acts of violence." A story about an unhappy kid in high school "is too intense and upsetting." Yet another story with an element of the fantastic as "Satanistic."

"What a desolation," I said aloud.

I should introduce myself. My name is Kathy, and my occupation is student. I thought it would be a wonderful idea to do my research project on censorship, focusing on banned books. All it was doing was making me depressed.

I looked down at the page the book was open to.

"_But what no one knew was that the Goblin King had fallen in love with the princess and given her certain powers. The princess knew that if she wished it, the Goblin King would take her brother away…."_

I laughed to myself and looked around the sterile white dorm room I shared with another girl, not here at the moment.

"I wish the goblins would come and take me away," I said, and taking in the amount of work I still had to do before I could go to bed, added, "Right now."

Then before I knew what I was about, the lights in the room were extinguished, someone cackled, there was a knock at the window, and somebody or _something_ grabbed my leg. I screamed, but the sound was abruptly cut off by the appearance of... well…. He could only be the Goblin King.

He had a lot of blond hair, cut in a way I can't begin to describe, but I liked it. His eyes were blue and well-lined with black, sweeping up towards his brows, shaded with white. He had a slim nose, and a mouth that…. The phrase "a form like Mortal Sin" flashed across my mind. It was almost enough to make me say the hell with everything reasonable and throw myself at him. Even chill-blooded intellectuals like myself have our moments. As it was, I stood there, clasping my hands together and trying to look innocent.

"You're the Goblin King," I said, relieved to note that my voice was fairly normal.

He smiled and inclined his head an inch or so.

"Where am I?"

"Haven't you guessed?" His voice was low and soft, smoky, and sharply accented.

"I'm in the land of the goblins." I looked at the book still in my hands. "No wonder the book was banned."

He took the book out of my hand and looked at it mockingly.

"May I have that back?" I asked.

"No, I think not." He tucked the book under his cloak. "I'll brush up on my reading."

"Why am I here?"

"You asked to be brought here, and what's said is said."

"But I wasn't serious."

He cocked his head to one side. "Weren't you? You weren't happy living the way you were. I can offer you much more than that."

"By turning me into a goblin?"

"No. I think I would prefer you to stay in this form, but if you prefer to make things difficult, you may attempt to solve the Labyrinth."

I turned around to look in the direction he was indicating and was faced with a vast maze with a castle far in the distance.

"It's said so far away," I said to myself.

"It's nearer than you think," the King said in my ear.

I turned my head. We were close enough together that I could see that his hair was tipped with black and a few other colors.

"Or is it? Nothing here is as it seems, Kathy." He brushed my cheek with his gloved hand and pointed at a clock which had magically appeared. "You have thirteen hours to solve the labyrinth, or you will stay here… forever."

And he faded into thin air.

"People come and go so quickly here," I said, but that wasn't funny, so I started down the hill to the walls that made up the Labyrinth.


	2. Logic

Approaching the wall I saw some things drifting about in the air. As I got closer I realized that they were fairies, and I stopped to admire them. Then a dwarf appeared with a sprayer in his hands, which he used to zap the nearest fairy. It squeaked and fell out of the air.

"Sixty-six," the dwarf said, sounding pleased.

"What did you do that for?" I asked.

"What else are you gonna do with fairies?" He replied.

"Don't they grant wishes, as long as you don't claim to be more beautiful than they are?"

He laughed uproariously and sprayed another fairy.

I started to protest, but having read banned fairy tales all afternoon, I decided that the fairies did indeed deserve Raid, or whatever it was he was hitting them with.

"Do you know how to get into the Labyrinth?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Will you please tell me?"

No answer. I didn't think I was going to like this guy, whoever he was.

"What's your name?"

He paused. "I'm Hoggle."

"Hello, Hoggle. My name is Kathy."

"Yeah, I know who you are."

So much for being friendly. "Where is the entrance to the Labyrinth?"

He pointed at the wall. "There."

"It wasn't there a second ago."

"Well, you can't take anything for granted here." We walked in. "Cozy, isn't it?"

"I've seen worse."

"Now are you going to go left or right?"

"Which way would you go?"

"Me? I wouldn't go either way."

I went cross-eyed trying to look both ways at once. Hoggle was starting to remind me of a very grouchy Scarecrow. "Of course some people do go both ways," I mused.

"That ain't what I said!"

"I know. I was talking to myself."

"Well, you won't get anywhere like that." On that note he turned and walked out through the gates, which closed and locked behind him.

I tried to lean my head on the wall immediately in front of me and damn near fell down flat on my face. It was only an optical illusion. I did have a choice other than left or right. Nothing is what it seems, indeed. I took a tentative step forward, and the steel gray walls with no turns or corners were replaced with tan stones and plenty of places to get lost in. Another step, and suddenly there was a dead end behind me.

I thought about what I had eaten for dinner as I started forward. I didn't think there was anything there that could cause hallucinations, so that left two alternatives: one, I was having that famous breakdown that we all knew was coming, or two, this was real. Of the two, the latter option was more appealing. Especially if that meant that the king was real. I slapped myself in the forehead. I had to solve a maze before thirteen o'clock, when everything would turn into a pumpkin and six white mice. I could indulge myself with impure thoughts later.

I don't know how long I wandered. My watch no longer worked, and the sky stayed the same peach color all the time. It might have been evening or morning; I couldn't tell. All of a sudden I heard some cackling and turned a corner to find what looked like the jacks on an old deck of cards that I used to have when I was a kid guarding two sets of doors.

"This was just a dead end," I said.

"No, that's the dead-end behind you," the head on the bottom of the red shield brayed, and all four heads laughed.

"What the- it keeps changing! What am I supposed to do?"

"Well, the only way out of here is to try one of these doors," the bottom blue head told me. "One door leads to the castle, and the other door leads to…."

(The top head went "Boo-boo-boom!")

"Certain death!"

On cue all the heads went "ooh!" I stood there for a moment, kind of stunned. My roommate would love this; she was a Math major and was always going on about her Logic class.

"Which door is it?" I asked.

The two bottoms looked at each other.

"We don't know," Red admitted.

"But they do," Blue finished.

"But you can't ask us," the top red said. "You can only ask one of us; it's a rule."

"And I should warn you that one of us always tells the truth, and one of us always lies," the top blue put in. "He always lies."

"I do not!" Red protested, sounding very British, Yorkshire maybe. "I tell the truth!"

"Ooh, what a lie!"

Oh, God, where was Hannah when I needed her?

"Okay," I said, approaching Red. "Which door would he say is the one that leads to the castle?"

The reds conferred for a few seconds, then the head I had spoken to, looking very confused, said, "this one?"

I pointed at Blue. "Then this one leads to the castle."

They "ooh"-ed again.

"How do you know? He could be telling the truth!"

"But then you wouldn't be."

"I could be telling the truth!"

"Then he would be lying."

Red looked at Blue. "Is that right?"

"I don't know. I've never understood it!"

This produced another round of laughter.

"I'd explain it, but it's best not to overthink these things." Blue let me pass through, and I let out a breath of relief. "Well, that was easy!"

Mistake. The ground disappeared under my feet, and I was suddenly falling down a hole with something grabbing at me.

"Help!" I shouted, in case anyone was listening and felt merciful.

All at once, I was no longer falling, suspended by some unseen force.

"What do you mean 'help?'" A voice asked, and I realized that the wall was made up of thousands of hands, which formed faces to talk.

"We're helping hands," another face said.

"You're hurting me." I said.

"Would you like us to let go?"

"No!"

"Well, which way do you want to go… up or down?"

"Oh."

"Come on, come on. We haven't got all day."

I didn't see what else they could do with their time, but I didn't say that. "Since that's the way I started, I guess I'll go up."

"Upsy-daisy!"

"Augh!"

It was somewhat painful, and I got grabbed a little awkwardly once or twice, but finally the helping hands tossed me out of the makeshift trap door, which closed up behind me once I was out. I stayed there on the floor for a few minutes, catching my breath, when I got a feeling like I was being watched.


	3. Jareth

It was the king; he was sitting on the wall not far from me. I stumbled to my feet, and he leapt lightly down next to me.

"How are you enjoying my labyrinth?" He asked softly.

"I'll let you know when my heart palpitations die down," I replied.

His handsome face creased into a smile. "I see. You don't think that the labyrinth is a piece of cake?"

I shook my head then a horrible thought entered my mind. "There's no minotaur in here, is there?"

He produced a small crystal ball in his hand and juggled it back and forth without letting go. It was vaguely hypnotic. "Would you like one, Kathy?"

"No!"

"Then there will be no minotaur." He stopped juggling and held the crystal out to me. "You can stop this at any time, you know. Look at this. It's only a crystal, but when you turn it this way, it shows you your dreams."

I looked, and I caught a vague glimpse of myself inside the crystal, smiling.

The Goblin King's voice became very enticing. "Do you want it?"

"Yes," I admitted. "But I want to finish this."

Looking annoyed, he made the crystal disappear. "You're being difficult, Kathy."

"No one's ever accused me of being easy."

"Things might be more agreeable for you if you were."

"No doubt," I tilted my head to look at him. "What's your name, may I ask? You know my name."

His smile returned. "My name is Jareth."

I bobbed down into a mock curtsy, "Your Majesty."

He raised an eyebrow but seemed to realize that I was not making fun of him. "You've been in the labyrinth for five hours now." The clock appeared again. "And you still have a ways to go… are you hungry?"

Now that he mentioned it, yes. If he was right, then I hadn't eaten in nearly ten hours.

Jareth held out a peach the size of my fist. It was a perfect-looking peach, and it smelled wonderful, but I was hesitant. Who was it who said to beware of Greeks bearing gifts?

"What is it?" I asked.

"It's a present," he took my hand and pressed the fruit into it, keeping his hand on mine a second longer than he needed to. "Keep it; you'll want it later."

"Thank you."

He pointed at the clock. "You're doing very well. How about upping the stakes?"

Suddenly the clock jumped ahead three hours.

"That's not fair," I exclaimed.

"I wonder what your basis for comparison is."

"I'll give you that one."

But he was gone.


	4. Talking Heads

I kept walking and was disappointed but not necessarily surprised to find that there was just more of the Labyrinth ahead of me. After all, the door guardians hadn't promised me a straight shot at the castle, just death on one side and the castle on the other. Damn loopholes.

A wheezy breathing sounded behind me, and a very large old man with a bird on his head shuffled by me and sat down heavily on a very large stone chair that he nonetheless filled.

I approached him. "Excuse me, sir?"

"Huh? Oh, the young woman," he mumbled.

The hat, it seemed, had a mind of its own because it looked at me and went, "woo woo!"

I gave it a dirty look but said nothing to it and spoke directly to the old man. "Do you know the way to the castle, sir?"

"You want to get to the castle," he echoed mystically.

"How's that for brain power?" The bird trilled.

"Be quiet," the old man yelled at his hat.

"Aw, nuts!"

The old codger turned his attention back to me. "You see, my dear, sometimes the way forward is the way back."

"Sorry?" I asked.

The bird made a noise of disgust. "Would you listen to this crap?"

"Enough!" The man thumped his fist on the arm of the chair.

"Alright!"

"Finished?"

The bird grunted in what we took for a yes.

He cleared his throat importantly. "Quite often, young woman, it seems as if we are not getting anywhere when in fact…."

The bird broke in, "we are!"

"We are," I could hear the disgust in his voice.

"Well I'm not getting anywhere standing around here."

"Join the club!" A loud snore turned the bird's and my attention back to its host. "Uh, I think that's your lot. Please leave a contribution."

I looked at the peach in my hand. "Would you like this?"

"He can't it eat, and what good would it do me? I'm just his hat!"

I fished around in my pocket and came up with a dime, which I dropped in the box by the old man's right hand.

"Grazie, signorina!"

"There's one born every minute," I said to myself, choosing the nearest pathway in the maze. "That was a Chinese fortune cookie."

The path I chose turned out to be so full of twists and turns that my head was spinning. I sat down to rest and the smell of that peach started to get to me. It was a pain carrying it around… I ought to just eat it. I held the fruit up to my lips and was about to take a bite when I started to have some doubts. What happened the other times people accepted tempting pieces of fruit from a mysterious stranger? Fig leaves and glass coffins resulted. Then again, those were apples.

I pressed my nose against the peach the way I would any other piece of fruit to see if it was good, and something behind me sneezed. I also heard another muffled sound that sounded kind of like "Gesundheit." Startled, I stood up very fast and turned around to see two doors that had clearly not been there when I first sat down. Each door had a knocker with an ugly face on it. The ring on the first knocker was in its ears; the other face held the ring in its mouth.

"It's very rude to stare," the one with the ring through its ears yelled.

"I'm sorry! I just…."

"Huh?"

"Mmf nn gnd…" the one with the ring in its mouth said.

"Don't talk with your mouth full!" The first one snapped.

The second one made an angry muffled retort, and I pulled the ring out of his mouth. "Ah! It is so good to get that thing out!"

"What did you say?" I asked.

"I said it's no good talking to him; he's deaf as a post!"

The first one groused, "Mumble, mumble mumble! You're a wonderful conversational companion!"

"You can talk! All you do is moan!"

"No good! Can't hear you!"

I looked at the one I had freed. "Where do these doors lead?"

"Search me; we're just the knockers!" He cackled, no doubt thinking himself very clever.

I set down the ring and tried the door. It wouldn't budge. "How do I get through?"

"Knock! And the door… will open!"

"'_Seek and ye shall find_,'" I replied, knocking on the other door.

"Ouch," the deaf one yowled. "My head!"

"Sorry!"

"What?"

The other knocker and I groaned in unison, and the door slammed shut behind me. I took in my surroundings. I was in a junkyard… the mother of all junkyards. I'd never seen anything like this, not even in my Biology class when we watched that disgusting movie about pollution or when the little boy I babysat wanted to watch _There Goes a Garbage Truck_ three times in a row. Then again, this was the cleanest garbage I'd ever seen. There were no food scraps or anything like that. It was old toys, furniture, and other random junk like that. Dusty but not rotten.

I saw a Strange Change Machine like the kind my dad and I had played with when I was a kid on a nearby pile and reached for it, but something screeched at me.

"Hey, that's mine!"

I looked down and realized that the pile I was staring at was a bundle of sorts on the back of a very little woman. The pile was two or three times bigger than she was at least.

"I'm sorry," I apologized, startled.

Muttering, she shuffled on her way.

"Well, I'll be damned," I said to myself, and without thinking, I held the peach up to my lips and had a bite.


	5. The Trip

I had two more bites before I started to feel dizzy. I put my free hand on my forehead and looked down at the peach.

"Oh hell," I said.

My vision swam, and I fell back against the nearest pile. I wasn't quite unconscious, but I wasn't exactly alert either. At last I sank down onto the ground, not really able to move, yet not caring. I began to hear music in my head, and then three crystals floated over to me. Inside them I could see myself, my china girl in a long red Renaissance dress, and just swirls in the third one. I held out my hand for them and….

_I was standing in a room that seemed to be nothing but mirrors. My long blonde hair was swept up and dripped blood red rosebuds. My long red gown trailed behind me as I looked for something. Or maybe it was someone. I wasn't sure._

_ I took a step and found that the dress weighed nothing at all. I smiled, and a thousand times my radiance was reflected back at me. Jareth's head appeared once behind mine then disappeared. I turned around but no one was there. Three more of him appeared to my right. I walked over that way, and then suddenly he was behind me. He was smiling._

_ Pleasantly irked, I resumed my search with more determination. I turned around twice more with only a reflection to show for my efforts. This time when another mocking reflection presented itself to me, I didn't make any turns but kept going straight and then he was standing in front of me._

_ I touched his arm to make sure he wasn't just another reflection, and was rewarded by the softness of his blue sleeve and the warmth of life underneath. He turned around and embraced me, and at first I was pleased by this, but then for a reason I can't explain, I just realized that something was wrong and shoved him away. He stared at me, and I ran away from him. I had to get out of here, but there didn't seem to be any entrances or exits._

_ Looking behind me I saw the king and his reflections. His beautiful sharp eyes stared at me with reproach, but he remained standing where I had left him, arms folded across his chest. I shut my eyes and put my elbow to the mirror behind me. It shattered, and a hard chill breeze seemed to blow everything away._

I came to lying flat on my back in a street somewhere. I gingerly sat up and inspected myself. There didn't seem to be any damage, or anything missing. But where the hell was I? I'd heard of people waking up in places unexpected, but I never thought it would happen to me.

That nagging feeling that I got when I was forgetting something was gnawing urgently at the back of my mind. I had to do something, something important, but what was it? I looked at my watch and saw that it had stopped. For some reason this made the worrying more pronounced, so I started walking.

This was the damndest town I had ever seen. It was half-sized and vaguely medieval. There were even chickens loose in the street! No one seemed to be about, and anyway, if someone was around, what could I say? "I just woke up in the alley over there; can you tell me where the hell I am?" That would go over well.


	6. Back on Track

I wandered aimlessly for a few minutes and then an ugly little dwarf appeared, smoking a pipe. He stopped when he saw me.

"So you're here! I didn't think you'd ever get through the Labyrinth!"

Labyrinth? Something clicked in my mind.

"Who're you?" I asked.

"Hoggle!" He gestured at me angrily with the pipe. "It's bad enough that Jareth can't get me name right, but it seemed like you'd have a better memory!"

"Jareth?" The image of the handsome man in the mirror room swirled vaguely through my mind's eye, and then everything clicked into place. "Oh my God! I've got to get to the castle! I can't have much time left!"

Hoggle's pipe hit the ground, and he bonked himself on the head with his fist. "Oh, what've I done? He'll throw me in the Bog of Eternal Stench for this, head-first!"

"The what?" I was momentarily distracted.

"The Bog of Eternal Stench! It's just what it sounds like, and if that's not bad enough; you set one foot in it, and you'll stink forever! It'll never wash off."

"Well, I won't tell if you won't, Hoggle."

He shook his head. "You've got to understand my position. I'm a coward, and Jareth scares me!"

"What kind of position is that?"

"No position, that's my point! Anyway, you wouldn't be so brave if you'd ever smelled The Bog of Eternal Stench."

True, but it was hard for me to imagine anything that could possibly smell worse than the trash room in the basement of the dorm. At least that scent didn't stick with you for the rest of your life.

"I promise I won't tell Jareth that you set me back on track Hoggle, but I've only got a little time left; I've got to get to the castle!"

He picked up his pipe and sighed. "Since I'm already as good as dunked, I might as well tell you the way. Two more houses down, and that street leads straight there."

"You're an angel."

"No, I'm not. I'm Hoggle."

I smiled a little in spite of myself and followed his directions. They were accurate enough. I could see the castle now, as soon as I looked for it, and the street he told me about led straight there.

I was surprised to see no guards outside the castle. Instead there were two milk bottles. I picked one up and gave it a curious sniff. It smelled like plain old milk, but after that peach… for all I knew it could be milk plus drencrom, like Alex and his droogs were drinking (_A Clockwork Orange_, Public Enemy Number One on certain banned books lists).

I opened the door of the castle revealing a very chaotic hall that went dead silent as I stepped inside. Even the chickens stopped squawking. Every eye was on me, but none of those eyes belonged to Jareth, the Goblin King. I saw his throne in the middle of the room, but it was empty.

"Where is the king?" I asked, but the goblins only laughed.

I saw the magic clock and realized that I only had five minutes left. A wave of panic bubbled up in my throat, but then I saw that there was only one door out of the throne room. I started to walk towards it, and while they became as silent as the guardians of a tomb, the goblins made no move to stop me. Maybe they were hoping to make me nervous enough that I'd turn tail and run. If that was what they wanted, they came pretty damn close to succeeding. It's very disconcerting to walk through a room full of monsters that just stare at you.

But I kept going. I'd come too far to be scared off by bunch of Muppet-wannabes. I stepped through the doorway and was greeted by a room that defied all the known laws of gravity and physics. It was nothing but stairs in every direction imaginable. I bravely crept to the edge of the staircase immediately in front of the door and looked down. Jareth stared back at me. He was standing underneath, upside-down. I nearly fell over in shock.

He walked onto the same landing as me, totally uninhibited by the fact that he was upside-down, and the fact that I was standing there. _He walked right through me!_ I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, we were standing in what appeared to be the same place, but it wasn't. The stones we were standing on were suspended in midair by nothing, and the staircases floated around us. That magic clock was there, frozen at 13 o'clock.

He was before me, terrible and beautiful in a white feathery cloak. He was all in white, which made his darkened eyes leap out at me with their mystery.

"Kathy," Jareth said. "I move the stars for no one."


	7. 13 O'Clock

"I've solved the Labyrinth," I said. "And I arrived at your castle before the thirteen hours were up."

"Kathy," Jareth said again. "You asked to be taken away; I brought you. I have reordered time." (The hands on the clock spun backwards and kept going). "I have turned the world upside-down, and I have done it all for you! I'm exhausted. Isn't that generous?"

Yes, I was forced to admit. It was generous, but only to a point.

"You gave me the poisoned peach," I reminded him.

"I did, but did it hurt you?"

"No… I guess it didn't. But that was still a dirty trick."

"Nothing in life is fair, Kathy. That's just the way things are, but…." He handed me my book, open to one of the last pages. "The words you want are there."

I looked at them.

"_Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City. For my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom is as great..."_

He held out another crystal to me. "Think about what I am offering you."

"_You have no power over me."_

I looked up at him and closed the book. I could say the words if I wanted to. They were clear in my head; I could still hear them.

"I ask for so little. Just let me rule you, and you can have everything that you want. Just fear me, love me, do as I say… and I will be your slave." He stepped closer to me, forcing me to meet his gaze.

He had beautiful eyes. Blue, but one was slightly darker than the other. I couldn't read them, though. I've never understood how people were able to talk about being able to see exactly what people were thinking about just by looking at their eyes.

"Isn't there a paradox in there?" I asked, trying to keep my voice light, but it fell about halfway through the sentence.

He gave his head an almost imperceptible shake. "Kathy…."

My thoughts whirled like the hands on the clock. I wouldn't exactly say that my life flashed before my eyes because when people say that, they usually end it by saying, "God, it was great!"

"You," I said to the Goblin King, "Are incredibly selfish, and you have a very cruel sense of humor, but… you never hurt me, even though you had ample opportunity to several times. That must mean something."

My hand reached out and took the crystal from him.

All at once I was bathed in a warm rosy light, and the crystal itself disappeared. I shut my eyes, and when I opened them I was once again in the red dress with my hair pinned up and dripping rosebuds. We were not standing in the suspended place or in the dizzying staircase room but in front of a window that overlooked the Labyrinth. I struck the wall with the back of my hand, and when it did not shatter, I turned back to Jareth, smiling.

"Just making sure," I said.

"You don't trust me?" He asked, sounding a little offended.

"Well, in a place where nothing is what it seems, it pays to be careful." I leaned in and gave him a kiss. "But not too careful."


End file.
